He was one of the first cartoonists to depict the German's as ridiculous rather than as ogres tearing babies apart." He led people into questioning the war effort but at the same time his creations - depicting 'Weapons of Moronic Distinction' - were useful in helping morale," says Endeacott.īeare agrees: "He made an important contribution to the war effort just by raising morale. "A lot of anti-war protests stemmed from Heath Robinson. ($(KGrHqJ,!ooFC72n+wIRBRrLHGhKBg~~60_12.JPG) is a fearsome battle vehicle - half submarine, half zeppelin - for a double-pronged German attack. ![]() ![]() One such cartoon showed "a new method of training young German ski troops to do the goose step on the frozen steppes of Russia", another depicts "the Huns using siphons of laughing gas to overcome our troops before an attack in close formation" (1915), while "Flying Kettle Attack" features German troops with tiny umbrellas impaled on their Pickelhaubes (spiked helmets) sending kite-flown kettles pouring hot water over to the allied trenches, and the Despite its shortcomings, it was an effective prototype, and paved the way to the development of the Colossus computer, which swapped tape for an electronic system. The machine was called Heath Robinson, after the British cartoonist and illustrator best known for designing fantastically complicated machines. Read more: Gallery: Heath Robinson: the unsung hero of British eccentricity and innovation Keeping these tapes synchronised when they were moving at over 1,000 characters a second was a major challenge, and they would often tear or stretch. The second tape had to be precisely one character longer than the first so that it would automatically change the punched patterns by one position after completing a single circuit of the tapes. ![]() It was a tricky system: the teleprinter tape had to be prepared meticulously, requiring two very long loops of the paper - one with 2,000 characters of cipher text and the other punched with patterns generated by the Lorenz machine's message-encrypting wheels - to be fed into the machine, woven around a sequence of spools. The machine consisted of three parts: a frame onto which two teleprinter paper tapes were mounted - weaving their way through a convoluted network of reels - and read optically a rack containing counters and another rack for valved logic circuits. Wells in a letter to Heath Robinson in 1914*Ĭolossus, the world's first electronic programmable computer, had a simpler predecessor: an electromechanical machine created in 1943 used byīritish codebreakers at Bletchley Park to crack the German Lorenz cipher machine.
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